3732. Class II & 1/2 Mass Estimation of Light Aircraft Composite Wings
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Paper
Abstract
An accurate mass estimation is key to better evaluate aircraft concepts during conceptual and preliminary design. The influence of composite materials on the structural mass estimation of large commercial aircraft has been reviewed on several studies. For light aircraft however, few methods besides applying a fudge factor to scale down masses of an equivalent metallic wing are available. On aircraft concepts deviating from a classical con- figuration statistical methods can not be reliably used for the mass estimation. Therefore Class II & 1/2 and Class III methods, which account for the loading of the structure, are expected to provide a better estimation.In this paper we develop a Class II & 1/2 method to estimate structural masses of composite light aircraft wings. For this, the primary structure of several wings is dimensioned according to static strength criteria. The structure is modeled using a stick beam model. Static aerodynamic loads are calculated using a vortex lattice method. The masses of the dimensioned structures are then compared to the published masses of the considered wings. The comparison is used to calibrate the estimation method and account for sec- ondary structures and miscellaneous items. At last, the deviations between the real masses and the estimated ones using different methods are compared to evaluate the suitability of the developed method.
